the most boring field in the world.

Language is a field that is sure to get a hostile yawn from the most
intellectual audiences.They may run
to their book-club and read a novel a week for fun, but the idea of reading
anything about language, or hearing about language, or discussing language,
turns them off like a light bulb.

And let’s face it:They may come by their hostility fairly.English classes in school tend to be picky versions of etiquette classes,
with enough ‘Do not…’s to occupy the secret police of a totalitarian dictatorship.Foreign language classes are even worse, with endless memorization
of conversations and conjugations.Even
foreign language teachers seem not to be interested in foreign languages (other
than perhaps their own).

But language just
happens to reveal truths about human history and even human psychology that
simply cannot be seen through other fields.

Nowhere is the historical importance of language more true than with
Biblical Hebrew, largely because the Canaanite alphabet is at the basis of
all alphabets, anywhere in the world, including not only the Greek and Roman
alphabets (the latter includes the “English” alphabet), but even the Devanagari
alphabet of India, the Arabic alphabet, and others. What I call the “Canaanite”
alphabet is traditionally called “Old Hebrew” or “Phoenician”:It was used in the time of kings David and
Solomon, and is implied by the Hebrew Bible to have been used in the writing
of the Ten Commandments, but it was also the writing system that Northern
Canaanites (whom the Greeks called “Phoenicians”) created for the Greek language.(We know that it was a Semite who created the Greek alphabet because
only a Semite would have heard q
as a separate sound in European languages:This letter quickly dropped out of Greek, but not before it was borrowed
in the Roman alphabet, where it has stayed, as a relict of no particular value
— except to show that the Greek alphabet was invented by a Semite hearing
Greek, and not by a Greek seeing Canaanite writing.

The order of letters
in the “English” alphabet (a version of the Roman alphabet) is largely the
same as in Hebrew (a later form of the Canaanite), showing that a teaching
method sometimes still used today, the “alphabet song,” is a three-thousand-year-old
teaching method — not a testament to pedagogical innovation, or even to its
success!

The Canaanite alphabet
had an additional feature:The letter-names
were often paired by topic, so you had pairs like ayin—pé “eye—mouth” and resh—shin “head—tooth,” which was a further
help to the pedagogical relevance of the alphabet order.The names of the Canaanite and Hebrew letters
are themselves of enduring interest, as we will see below.

The Greek letter-names
were all meaningless mispronunciations of Canaanite words, and thus lost the
meaningfulness of the order (while preserving the order in teaching, again
characteristic of the history of pedagogy).So Greek kappa
is a mispronounced kaf “spoon, ”
Greek gamma is a mispronounced gamal from which the English word camel is derived, and Greek beta is a mispronounced bet “house,” from which we get names for
places (including synagogues) like Beth-El
“house of God,” Beth Jacob “House
of Jacob.”

qabalah.

Qabalah (qabalah, Jewish
mysticism) is another field that produces an immediate hostile reaction among
many:Many transfer their hostility to
Hhasidism over to qabalah, since
Hhasidism was founded on basic insights and texts of qabalah. Once regarded as so dangerous that only pious male Jews
over age 40 should study it (it was then that the word cabal was taken from its name), it has more recently exploded into
the paperback market, with dozens of books aimed at the “psychological
self-help” audience.Indeed, even
secularists will be able to accept the many qabalistic suggestions for
self-help, perhaps including even study and mediation on such qabalistic
concepts as the “Tree of Life.”(I am
using unconventional but more correct spellings — qabalah for kabbalah or cabalah, and hhasidism for chasidism
— because we will be looking cloesly at Hebrew letters:q is the same letter that shows that
the Greek alphabet was invented by a Semite;hh is a better representetation for the sounds of Hhanukah and hhutspah than the German spellings ch,
which is easily misinterpreted as in chaos or chair.These were both originally pronounced deep
in the the throat.)

Qabalahitself means “receiving” (the same word is used in Modern Hebrew for “receipt”),
and refers to the way in which an individual can “receive” this tradition — or
the tradition can “receive” the individual!It is not a widely used term in qabalistic literature:Other terms like hhokhmah nisteret “wisdom [which is] hidden”) are used — where
terms are used at all.A major claim of
qabalah is that there exists a Higher
World (’olam elyon) or Spiritual
World (’olam ruhhani, from ruahh “spirit”) above or behind the
physical world.(Notice how the
adjective follows the noun in all three Hebrew phrases quoted, just as in
English body beautiful or court martial or attorney general, and as in French and Spanish.)

Modern science with
its atoms, Big Bang, strings, and worm-holes fits better into this kind of
universe with a Higher, Spiritual World — like Plato’s World of Ideal Forms —
than into the materialistic world of Bertrand Russell or Karl Marx, although
modern science and Plato both lack the primarily moral focus that qabalah shares with the rest of
Judaism.

Qabalah anticipates the left- vs.
right-brain insight of modern cognitive psychology, with its understanding of hhokhmah “Wisdom” (implying an
embracing, synthesizing insight) vs. binah
“Discernment” (implying the making of distinctions, thus an analytic kind of
insight).Qabalah emphasizes that true “Knowledge,” da’at, requires merging these two complementary kinds of
thought-process.(The qabalistic triad hhokhmah—binah—da’at has given its
abbreviation, hhabad, to the outreach
movement of Lubavitch Hhasidism.)

This triad is
dominated by keter “crown,”
emphasizing the unified (“monistic”) nature of the universe in the view of qabalah and Judaism.Keter
is as close as humans can come to conceiving of God:Above the level of keter,
in qabalah, only such terms as en sof “infinity” (literally “absence-of
end”) can be used to discuss God.

keter

Crown

left-brained

right-brained

binah

hhokhmah

Discernment

Wisdom

da'at

Knowledge

In the “Tree of
Life,” a parallel triad consists of hhesed
“Lovingkindness” and din “Judgment,”
as combining in tiph’eret
“splendor.”Again the therapeutic
concept is the importance of balance in one’s personality.

justice

din

hhesed

mercy

Judgment

Kindness

tiph’eret

Splendor

The “levels” of the
Tree of Life are called sphirot
(singular sphirah), which sounds like
the Greek word for “sphere,” but is based on the Hebrew root s-p-r “to count; to recount.”This root is of crucial importance in
Judaism, as can be seen in the importance of such words derived from this root
as sepher torah “Book of Teaching,” sopher “scribe” (originally a writer of
Torah scrolls, but now meaning any sort of “writer”), not to mention mispar “number” and sphirah “Era.”The first
work of qabalah, the sepher yetsirah “Book of Creation,”
begins with the idea that God created the universe with three “books” (spharim):text (sepher), number (sphar), and communication (sipur).

justice

din

hhesed

mercy

Judgment

Kindness

tiph’eret

Splendor

Anyone who has heard
of qabalah has heard of gematriyah, the qabalistic
interpretation of words based on the numerical values of their letters.The most famous example is the
identification of “18” with “life” in Jewish tradition, based on the values of
the letters:yud = 10 and hhet = 8,
spelling hhay “alive, life.”

In qabalah, there is also a huge literature
on the “wisdom” or “meaning” of the Hebrew letters:a few old and new books in Hebrew, and even more in English, even
at your local bookstore.In fact, the
qabalistic view is that God used the Hebrew alphabet as the “atoms” or
“building blocks” of the Universe, as the
sepher yetsirah puts it:God
engraved 32 mystic paths of Wisdom — the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet plus
that ten digits.(Zero is the tenth
digit.It was then being introduced to
the Western world.The first recorded
use of a zero in Europe was apparently in Hebrew.)

Qabalists often
contrast other languages, in which the words are “arbitrary” (there is no
reason that pan must be a flat cooking
utensil in English, while meaning “bread” in French) with Hebrew, in which each
word is (supposedly) more appropriate to its reference — partly because, in the
qabalistic view, the letters
(that is, the Hebrew consonants) have
individual meanings.

As a linguist, I am
unable to give great credence to the concept that God used Hebrew letters as
atoms with which to build the universe.After all, the Hebrew language and alphabet are specific points in the
middle of two long historical chains, these points occurring a mere three
thousand years ago, long after the world, and even humans, came into
being.But, also as a linguist, I was
amazed to find that the qabalistic insight of Hebrew letters having individual meanings is remarkably
true!We will be looking at this
insight closely — even as a way in which non-specialists might be able to “get
into” the Hebrew that is behind Judaism, in the Bible and prayer-book.

knowledge of Hebrew.

This conversation can often be heard in the Jewish community:

Do you read Hebrew? —Yes.

But do you understand what
you read? —No.

But this conversation is actually nonsensical.Do you read Turkish?If the conversation made sense, then you
would have to say, “Yes, I read Turkish” — because it’s written in the
same alphabet as English:If by “read”
you mean pronouncing words, as in the conversation above, then of course you
can “read Turkish” (like the Turkish jailer in the movie Midnight Express, a Hollywood actor who just read the script
without knowing what it meant).

Many in the Jewish
community learn the Hebrew alphabet well enough, but never get beyond the
letters.The term for that is
“functionally illiterate”!So the above
conversation ought to be: Have you
studied Hebrew? —Yes.I went to Hebrew
school for four years, and I’m functionally illiterate!

There is even a
joke about a rabbi boasting how he got rid of mice in the synagogue:“I made them bné-mitzvah, and they have never been in synagogue since!”But what about those who do come back?A visitor to an American synagogue (from
Mars, or even from Israel) might be impressed by the fluency of services in
Hebrew — especially in the daily minyan,
where a hundred pages are pronounced in the blink of an eye.But a vocabulary test would reveal that few
of these fluent pray-ers know very much — or anything at all — of what they are
saying.Even the facing translation has
not impinged on the consciousness of most synagogue-goers, over many years of
attendance.

But any literature
works best in the original, and the Hebrew Bible is no exception.While parts of it may “sound good” in
English translation, its meaning can only be appreciated in the original. Is
there any hope for the ordinary, busy Jewish adult (not to mention the child,
pre- or post-bar-mitzvah) to learn
the meanings of Hebrew words, when their focus seems to be limited to
letters?Or are we forever condemned
to mumbling words that we don’t understand?

What about American
Jews with an interest in Israel?The
typical conversation course may not even give you enough speaking ability to
overcome the desire of Israelis to be helpful and practice their English.And the oleh
hhadash to Israel finds soon enough that even conversational abilities help
little when trying to read a newspaper.Reading the Hebrew Bible, with its three-thousand-year-old Hebrew, may
in some ways be harder if you can converse in Modern Hebrew.

But, as it happens,
gaining some insight into the original meaning of the Hebrew Bible does not
require you to be a Hebrew scholar or een a fluent speaker:The main vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible is
small.Knowledge of a few dozen words
can start you off recognizing a lot, and elementary study of Hebrew
three-consonant “roots” can reveal deep meaning relationships clearly.The vocabulary has not changed much more
than English from the time of Shakespeare to our time — but, even more
important, the most important three-consonant “roots” have changed little from
Ancient to Modern Hebrew.

But is there any
hope for the American Jew, reared on Hebrew letters as the main psychological
focus and thinking of Hebrew vocabulary as a vast wilderness, to ever reach the
Promised Land of actually comprehending
written Hebrew; that is, of actually learning a sufficient number of
three-consonant roots to get around?

key-letters.

Indeed there is hope ... through qabalah!As it happens, the three-consonant “roots”
can be grouped for convenient learning … by their “key-consonant” — usually the
first letter of the root.

When I plowed
through a Hebrew dictionary some 25 years ago, in my own “crash program” to
learn vocabulary as an oleh hhadash
in Israel, I couldn’t help noticing (long before ever studying qabalah) that many words beginning with
the same letter had similar meanings.

It would be some 20
years before I would be able to turn this insight into techniques that would
actually make Hebrew easier for American learners, as my attempts to write a
short vocabulary for Hebrew students some ten years ago brought me back to the
insight of “key-letters.”

Traditional Hebrew
grammar is built on the insight of “triliteral” (three-consonant) roots as the
basis of Hebrew words, and some innovators over the ages have talked about
these triliteral roots coming from “biliteral roots,” but here I was coming to
an idea of “uniliteral roots” — individual meaningful consonants.

Let’s take an
example:p-r-q is a triliteral root meaning unload (cargo)or take apart (a structure),for which some grammarians further
claim a biliteral basis p-r- with a
similar meaning, as also in p-r-r crumble.I was now proposing a “uniliteral” ultimate root, p- meaning open up, disperse.

This “uniliteral”
root can also be found in p-t-hhopen, p-z-r disperse, p-r-h
fruitful, p-n-h to face, and also the nounspeh mouth, pnim interior, panim
face.(The face is what you
“open up” to other people.)

I have simiarly
devised an entire key-letter system for all of Hebrew.The system is somewhat complex — although of
course a lot less complex than a whole dictionary!In fact, I’ve written a “one-page dictionary” of Hebrew that
effectively lists thousands of words — but only their meanings, by initial
letter, not their whole spelling.(The
initial letter is what is most likely to be on the tip of the tongue
anyway!)The core of the system is
simply a set of meanings for the key-letters:16 letters of the Hebrew alphabet are key-letters, each with a few basic
meanings;in fact, even these few basic
meanings are related to each other.The
system must be practiced with many roots, and not just memorized;but its core is fairly sustem:two or three related meaning per key-letter.

Perhaps some parts
of the key-letter system can be presented in a form that will be useful to the
“ordinary busy adults” mentioned above (such as readers of the present
article).

The easiest
key-letter is no doubt pé:It means, as noted
above, open up, disperse — as in verbs like patahh, paqahh,
panah, pashat, pizer,
parats, potsets meaning open,
open one’s eyes, turn towards, stretch out, disperse, break through, explode;as well as nouns like peh, pnim,
and panimmouth,
inside, face, as mentioned.The
letter’s name means mouth, and it
looks like a “talking mouth.”

Some words
beginning with p extend opening
up metaphorically, such as for something wonderful or surprising,
like pe’er, pele’,
peta’, pit’omluxury,
wonder, surprise, suddenly.

complexity.

Even with context, I can’t guarantee that you will be able to guess
the exact meaning of a new root, but you’re better off than in English, where
you can rarely make any guess at all for the meaning of a new root out of
context (although of course you can guess the meaning of a new word if it
consists of familiar roots).In fact,
anyone could easily try out this generalization about p by looking through a
prayer-book, Bible, or dictionary that provides Hebrew text and facing
translation. Just keep in mind that, in theory, the p (or any letter) must
usually be initial for it to qualify as a key-letter.(And, of course, here as everywhere in language, there are always
complications and exceptions;on the
other hand, in many words the pé is
not initial, but is nevertheless the key-letter, because it is preceded only by
prefixes — or non-key-letters.)

Even if you don’t
know much Hebrew, you may be able at least to guess which is the English
translation of the p-word, and this may be a fun way to sort out which word in the
original text is equivalent to which word in its translation.This is a good way to force yourself to look
at the other side of the page, and in this way confront the meanings of the
prayers!(It is actually also how I
began to study Hebrew, with the Hertz Pentateuch, in my mid-twenties — knowing
nothing but the alphabet.Now,
admittedly quite a bit older, I have given lectures in Hebrew at professional
conferences, and published scholarly articles in Hebrew.)

Perhaps the second
best key-letter is kaf, whose
name means shovel, spoon, palm of hand, and
which looks like a spoon ready to “scoop something up.”In its meanings, it generally has something
to do with enclosing.So we have not only the word kaf itself, but also kol, kolel,
kavash, koahh, kele’,
kluv, meaning all, include, conquer, strength, jail, cage; and
also words for various kinds of handling,
such as kli, katav, kibes meaning instrument,
write, do laundry.

Like p, k has a single main meaning, although the
“branches” (its sub-meanings) may sometimes be hard to follow;for example, one major branch is the meaning
so, correct (kohen,
kasher, kakh, ken priest, suitable, so, yes).

But both letters
can be very useful even with as little definition as provided here.As they used to say about Levi’s rye
bread:“Try it, you’ll like it!”

It’s probably best
to work with these two letters for a while, for best results:You want to know the basic meanings “in your
heart,” and not have to carry them around on a card.But just for future reference, let me exemplify a few of the
other key-letters (reviewing p and k as well) that
are especially useful, although they have main “branches” that vary quite a
bit.

key-

letter

meanings

p

pé

open up, wonderful

k

kaf

enclose, handle

s

samekh

close, complete,
arrange, secret

r

resh

spirit, teach,
medicine

g

gimal

roll, pile up, big

q

quf

gather, receive, buy

hh

hhet

Bind, alive

As an example of how the system might work at its most powerful,
imagine seeing a Hebrew sentence in which you don’t know the verb:The
teacher X-ed the window.Guessing
just from context, X might mean open or close.There’s no
way to choose between these dramatically different meanings.But if you pay attention to their initial
letter, you might be able to guess:If X begins with p, then it means open (patahh), and if it begins with s
then it means close (sagar).

On a more abstract
level, X in another sentence The teacher X-ed the text, if it begins
with p,
would similarly probably mean interpret
(peresh), and if it begins with s,
it would mean summarize (sikem):Interpreting “opens up” the text, whereas summarizing “closes it
up.”This sort of metaphor is basic to
Hebrew, and characteristically interesting, revealing the interesting thought
patterns of the (subconscious) “inventors” of Hebrew of thousands of years ago.

Spanish may have
more “cognates” than Hebrew, like revolución
and fútbol, which make Spanish easier
to read and learn, of course.But
cognates are really just “too easy” to reveal anything interesting about
Spanish.Hebrew key-letters offer a deeper
fun, the fun of seeing how an interesting kind of image-making is behind the
most basic Hebrew words.This sort of
metaphoric connection is behind the root-structure of Hebrew as well — but
it becomes deeper as you dive into the depths of key-letters:It may be strange and hard to try to
remember the connection between the easy word kelevdog and the
hard word kluvcage — but this second word is more
easily learned alongside kele’prison, especially in relation to
the key-letter k meaning enclose.

The system is open
(patuahh!) enough that, even if you learn
all of the above, you will still see surprises.(There are always irregularities in language.)But can you relate the following Hebrew
words, familiar through English, to their key-letter meanings: golem, rabbi,
seder, kipur, qibutz?(The last is often spelled kibbutz in English, but qibutz is a better transliteration.)Of the Hebrew words semel andpa’ar, which of
them means gap, and which means symbol?(Hint:a symbol is like a summary.)You always have to ignore prefixes, so that torah and moreh
both come from the same root;what is
its key-letter meaning?Of the Hebrew
words pele’ and sod, which of them means secret, and which means miracle?

Can you explain the
meanings of the words from qabalah mentioned
earlier:qabalah receiving,
ruahhspirit,
en-sofinfinity (from sofend),
ketercrown,
hhokhmahwisdom
and hhesedlovingkindness,
dinjudgment
andda’atknowledge, and tipheretsplendor (ti- is a prefix, so the key letter is p)?How about the various words from the root s-p-r?(How many of these meanings can you remember?)

English key-letters.

By the way, English is not completely bereft of key-letters:Among the more reliable are:p, which begins many words for points, poking,
etc.;b, which begins many words for bulges and bumps;andg, which begins many words for abundance, including abundant
light (grand, good, God; glare,
glimmer) — although
usually with a bad connotation (garbage, gunk, gloom).The reader can no doubt think of many
examples of English words that fit these concepts — and many others that don’t
fit!I doubt that the system has enough
value to justify it for foreign learners of English:It is too diffuse, with too many exceptions.

In Hebrew, too, the
system as a whole is fairly complex — probably only 14 of the 16 key-letters
are worth learning, and most of them have two main meanings, with complex
branches.Just to prevent future
frustration, I might even now mention that the last five of the letters listed
above have additional meanings, as shown here with an example for each:

s

samekh

spin, confuse

sovspin

r

resh

stretch out, wide

rehhovstreet

g

gimal

border

gerstranger

q

quf

chop off

qatsarshort

hh

hhet

harm

hhaval too bad!

But even with these complications in the Hebrew system, there are
far fewer irregularities than in English, and therefore far greater opportunity
to use it for vocabulary learning:Even
though guessing the meanings of new words is often difficult, at least the
initial letter will support the meaning, thus helping the memory.And sooner or later, anyone can be not only
reading newspapers, but understanding the depths and uniqueness of this
suprisingly exotic and interesting language that has had such influence on the
world, and is so crucial to our understanding of our own heritage.

In fact, some
deeper connections are reflected in these complications.For example, the letter s means both spin and close:Are these two
very different meanings really connected?Or is it just the usual complexity of language, as in the two opposite
meanings of English oversight?In fact, Jewish culture connects these two
different concepts, spin and close, in obvious ways:The sepher
torahspins throughout the
year, but is the most characteristic Jewish symbol
of a complete teaching.The wedding-ring is a similar spinning symbol of completion.

In any case,
however, even these complications leave the system of Hebrew key-letter
meanings quite a bit simpler than the wide variety of interpretations and
homilies to be found in the qabalistic literature on the “wisdom of Hebrew
letters.”In fact, I have concluded
that my linguistic system represents the literal (pshat) level of interpretation, where the qabalistic literature
hovers on the other three accepted levels of interpretation (drash, remez, sod — moral
interpretation, allegorical interpretation, and mystic secret).This is nor a surprising conclusion, since
the field of linguistics is itself mostly concerned with the literal meaning of
language, including the Hebrew Bible, with other levels being left to rabbis
and qabalists.